This is Stefano Bertoncello's Blog (ステファノ・ベルトンチェッロ - トゥーグッドイアーズ − ブロガー、オーディオ＆ミュージック・コンサルタント) devoted to pacific topics like Music - live and reproduced - i.e. discs, audio, guitars - both vintage and new, concerts, workshops, and related stuffs.
Furthermore: travelling - as a mind-game and real globetrotting, and books, movies, photography... sharing all the above et al. and related links... and to anything makes Life better and Earth a better place to stay, enjoying Life, in Peace.

Premiering to the world at large, Tony Conrad’s gobsmacking quintessential opus Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain is now available to hear for the first time, featuring Laurie Spiegel and Rhys Chatham and arriving via Superior Viaduct just over a year since the death of the iconoclastic avant-garde violinist and composer in 2016.

Conrad’s sprawling, innovative practice - binding film, sound and performance in peerless and unprecedented style has been a huge influence on his myriad collaborators and far-flung body of avowed admirers. Just like the amazing and revelatory documentary, Tony Conrad: Completely In The Present [2016], this steeply immersive 1hr, 30 minute recording should also attract a whole new wave of listeners to his truly sui generis music and cement his place in the 20th century avant-garde firmament, if it wasn’t already.

Recorded at the piece’s premiere at The Kitchen, NYC, in 1972, this release of Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain effectively forms some of the earliest documentation of Tony Conrad solo, one year before his legendary ..with Faust LP. Accompanied by Rhys Chatham playing the Long String Drone - a six-foot strip of wood with bass strings and electric pick up, prepared with tuning keys, tape and metal hardware - and Laurie Spiegel thrumming a crunching arrhythmic bass throughout, Conrad leads the 1hr 28 minute piece with the sustained caterwaul of his favoured violin (often the most battered model he could find), scraping back and forth in a pitching, phasing, mind-bending performance dating to just after his time spent developing this technique as part of The Theatre of Eternal Music with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale - whom cites Conrad’s sonic philosophy and contributions to early live Velvet Underground actions as a pivotal formative influence over the esteemed artrock pioneers.

Completely mesmerising, the instinctively fearless results are belied by a conceptual and mathematical rigour that boldly asserted Conrad’s convictions in a unity and transcendence of all things. And yet whilst divorced from the visual aspect of the performance - a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, incremental overlapping to form a pulsating picture - which was surely a major part of the piece, the sonic results still carry a potent meaning through its durational reinforcement of purely dissonant tunings and insistently dragging yet forward motion - an inexorable drive intently focussing themselves, and the listener, in the eternal traction of the present.

In terms of that effect at least, we could compare the piece’s intensity and heightened hallucinogenic qualities with extended studies such as Éliane Radigue’s Transamorem - Transmortem, Alvin Lucier’s Music On A Long String Wire or Harley Gaber’s Wind Rises In The North, for example, yet there’s something utterly primal at play that bucks all those references, and appears closer to a prescient, overproof distillation of folk immediacy, rock’s lusting urge, and the hypnosis of tribal/trance/techno musics.

It’s a completely stunning piece of music that will repay the attentive, attuned listener with endless rewards.

After "Outside of Dream Syndicate" I loved so much eons ago, a Five Mojo's Stars...as for yours truly!

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Fausto Papetti, italian alto sax player extraordinaire represented for a much younger me a master of life more than a musician: his records very often showed as cover art the most beautiful lightly dressed, sometimes almost naked ladies... these girls were, back in early '70s, blinking from records shop windows and you can imagine the emotion and the turbament;-)

My pal Frank recently had a present for yours truly, Fausto Papetti's 13, a disc I already listened to and appreciated at his place, some months ago...

In the disc, lounging songs and two GREAT tunes, Take Five and Ode to Billie Joe, impress the listener for great musicanship and SUPERB sound and recording, I suspect the merit of maestro Barigozzi's engineering at Durium studios in Milan.

I suggest you to have a listen to the above mentioned pieces... the quality will blossom and impress also from an MP3 and shitty computer earphones.

Thanks to Franco for the gift and introducing me (again) to Papetti's music... a good companion to the so enjoyable lady on cover I always loved.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

In October 2017, frozen reeds will present the première release of Roland Kayn’s fourteen-hour masterpiece, ‘A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound’, as a sixteen-CD boxed set.

Roland Kayn’s truly epic ‘A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound’ is both a major late opus and a summation of his vast contribution to the fields of electronic music and composition. Hearing the briefest passage of this piece, assembled in 2009 and totalling almost fourteen hours in length, is enough to date the material it is comprised of back to the era of his noteworthy LP boxed sets, released on the Colosseum label in the late 70s and early 80s.

Kayn’s so-called “cybernetic music”, to use the term he preferred, resolutely refuses to showcase the methods employed in its creation. The mass of logical interactions and correspondences underpinning the sounds we hear are submerged so deeply below the surface as to defy analysis. We are left only with the results, which grant the listener a profound and unique experience.

With ‘A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound’, Kayn provides both a vast sonic territory and the invitation to explore it. From glacial, drone-like vistas to violent staccato sequences, the piece’s twenty-two movements chart the length and breadth of electronic music in as comprehensive a manner as has ever been attempted.

The resurgence of the modular synthesizer as a popular musical tool in recent years belies the possibility that its boldest virtuosi may already lie in the instrument’s past. In his work in Europe’s electronic music studios alongside colleagues such as Leo Küpper and Jaap Vink, Kayn created sonic textures in such abundant variety as to make genre categorisation redundant. Photographs of the one-off, hand-built systems upon which they were realised have inspired the awe of electronic-music connoisseurs for years, but their output has been all too little heard and appreciated.

In 2017, Roland Kayn represents perhaps one of the last titanic figures of 20th-century music to receive their due recognition, and to have their vital music restored to availability. Fresh from its release of Julius Eastman’s ‘Femenine’, which spurred on its composer’s wider rediscovery and gave rise to performances, broadcasts and festivals devoted to his work around the world, frozen reeds is proud to initiate the first stage of a similar process for Roland Kayn, which his incredible music so richly deserves.

Monday, July 24, 2017

This said, I kindly ask to both my age and younger music lovers and audiophiles to have a (re-) listen to Gentle Giant's albums.

The Prog albums between 1969 and 1974 were the azimuth of rock music... to my ears, sure considering the best examples and issues, the above is still valid and actual today.

Some records aged beautifully, others not so much...

Genesis' Foxtrot, King Crimson's 1st, In the wake of Poseidon, Lizard, Island and The Larks Tongue in Aspic and Gentle Giant's 1st, Acquiring the Taste, Three Friends, Octopus, Glass House and Free Hand are the true winners.

I listened in the last few days to the above mentioned Gentle Giant's discs, plus Interview and The Power and the Glory and... the hate also best Prog gets from music lovers is so sad!

Schulman and Minnears' bros' music sounds so refreshing and fresh, I dare saying brand-new, to my ears: please listen to "Nothing at all" on their first album on side two and you'll understand what I mean!!!

The group musical skills are HUGE and the music is hinting to the great English heritage: folk, ancient, renaissance and baroque suggestions are all here... plus jazz and rock, acoustic and electric, vocals blends a' la Beach Boys or Beatles or Steeleye Span or groovy, tight instrumentals... I so much enjoyed this special listening sessions...

Like when I have my week long or more Miles' listenings, it seems only getting the load of a musician on a daily, heavy diet you fully understand and appreciate it.

Everything considered, I suggest you to dig on this group production: my most beloved GG's disc is Three Friends, then 1st and Free Hand.

Music is truly majestic and sound is to die for... you'll be surprised and pleased!

Saturday, July 22, 2017

The freshly restored and rebuilt Lumiere DST # 157... also the air-gap between magnet was wrong - i.e. far too wide, resulting in an extremely low output... being now corrected, the sensitivity is 0,2 mV/2 ohms, as it should be...

... and as it was: coils were sadly awful as was the bent, uneven cantilever and diamond... a bad sampler, indeed.

Serge did it, again... I admit the seed of curiosity was already there, but last time I met Serge and I delivered him a pristine Technics RS 1500 US open reel tape recorder, he simply shined when he read on user manual it was OK to be used with 24V PSU!

Some months passed and...

Now Serge is ready to deliver his own open reel battery fed stage to the world!

Saturday, July 15, 2017

During my recent Japanese trip on last May, I had with me something...
Well knowing the polite habit - a pleasure for the donor, as well - of bringing a small present for the japanese host, I had in my bag some italian operas DVDs recorded/filmed at La Scala theatre in Milan, the italian temple of music and a Kingston 128GB USB key.

Adapting the present to the host and moment (some minutes were necessary to download the music...), I spread and shared the above from Sapporo to Ukiha, through Yamata, Tokyo and Kyoto...

Some of my Japanese friends got a (tangible) gift - i.e. a DVD... others had... MUSIC...

Intangible, spiritual, eerie, unique.

In the Kingston's I had stored 24bit/192khz recordings of live concerts I recorded between January and April 2017... percussions, strings, wind instruments... all recorded using Sound Devices 722 and Neumann USM-69.

I loved to give away, for free as a gift should be, my music and aural vision and interpretation of reality... a sonic picture which I hope and trust the ones who got this gift enjoyed . i.e. the music when played back through their audio-systems as I enjoyed attending to the concert, recording and editing (thanking my best friend Lo...).

Music is such a treasure, folks... making a deal on it sounds so... rude, coarse.

Thanking music, I'll be an audio seeker for the life... not viceversa.